Throughout the day, I juggle multiple email accounts and between work, life, and other reminders the important ones often get lost in the shuffle. With the introduction of BlackBerry OS 10.2 on the Z30, messages that you mark important based on certain criteria are highlighted and placed in a specific area so you can quickly navigate to them without being distracted by other items.

Once this feature is enabled, they populate the hub under the Priority Hub heading as well as being tagged in your individual email accounts. Emails marked as priority display a thin red line indicator to the right of the message. Though, this is not to be confused with color coding emails which appear to the left.

Not only does the priority feature act as a filter of sorts, but it adapts to the way you use your device. For instance, while it may mark certain items as priority based on the parameters specified in settings, you can manually add and remove them from the list. This way, it learns which ones to designate as priority for future incoming emails.

Turn on Priority Hub

The first order of business is activating the feature if not already turned on by default.

Go into the hub and tap on the more icon (three dots) and choose Settings

Scroll to and select Priority Hub

Toggle to the button to On

Selecting the criteria

By default, all options are turned on and appear in the space directly below the toggle switch. From here you can enable/disable the options to filter as follows:

Sender has the Same Last Name as Me

Message Sent with High Important

I Started the Conversation

By enabling any of these flags, incoming message that follow these rules automatically appear in the Priority Hub.

Adding / Removing Messages from the Priority Hub

As I mentioned earlier, it can be taught which messages it classifies as being important to you so that it populates the priority hub accordingly. This is accomplished by going through your messages and adding or removing the priority designation.

To add

Select a message from the BlackBerry Hub and long press until the menu appears to the right

To add a message, tap on the Up Arrow icon (Add Priority)

A dialog box appears prompting you to select a reason for the change. Select either This contact is priority orThis conversation is priority

Tap OK

To remove

Select a message from the BlackBerry Hub and long press until the menu appears to the right

To remove a message, tap on the Down Arrow icon (Remove Priority)

A dialog box appears prompting you to select a reason for the change. Select either This contact isn't priority or This conversation isn't priority

Tap OK

Now you can quickly access those all important messages without having to scroll through the entire hub.

One of the early leaked 10.2 builds had a fantastic implementation of Priority Hub, but it has been overly-simplified ever since, in my opinion. It had about 10 different criteria (which you could turn on or off) which the OS could use to auto-populate the Priority Hub and I really wish I remembered what all they were. One was "I exchange messages frequently with this person", another was "I am meeting with this person today" <- brilliant!
I may just have to reload that old leak to see what they all were. It was really impressive and I found myself using the priority hub a lot! Since then it hasn't been nearly as useful. Again, this is just my opinion.

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